Select language

Objective

"The revolution in information technology over the last years has proven its ability to process huge amounts of data and made evident that big data can change the world. Open Government Data (OGD), from being an obscure possibility just five years ago, is spreading across the globe at a phenomenal rate, delivering the promise to spur innovation, to deliver better services for less money, to improve planning, to increase transparency, and to reduce corruption. In this context, YourDataStories envisions to bring this promise closer to reality, through a highly customisable online platform for data exploitation focused in the financial flows that are critical for transparency, collaboration and participation. Users, ranging from governmental bodies to journalists and to citizens, will be facilitated by powerful and established tools, not only to discover relevant information but also to remix it with diverse and dynamic data sources: YourDataStories acts like an interactive canvas to enable data citizens to (re)write their own data history.YourDataStories brings an innovative solution whose innovation potential spreads across many directions, from leveraging best practices and proven technologies across Europe, to exploiting the social Web for accessing citizens, and to supporting sustainable public services across borders. Building on top of the ""Transparency Portal"" initiative of the Greek government, YourDataStories can be viewed as a way to showcase and transfer the existing expertise to European level, in an attempt to transform governments and governance in Europe. At the same time, YourDataStories seeks to exploit and embed in this effort the benefits of the social Web, establishing an innovative bidirectional channel between the Social and Semantic Web. Finally, YourDataStories aims to support sustainable services, supported by a marketing ecosystem of applications offering cross-border services of public finance flows across Europe."

The massive amounts of data that technology generates – from the social web to public records – can offer valuable insight in identifying social issues and even improving public services. Known as Big Data, the information must be however processed in a way that yields useful patterns and conclusions.
Enhanced transparency in government
The concept of open government data, which focuses on transparency, accountability and reusability of data held by a government, requires new solutions for using Open Data to the benefit of the public and the public sector. The EU-funded YDS project, which stands for Your Data Stories, developed a highly customisable online platform to exploit data in a spirit of transparency, collaboration and participation. “YDS can support users to interconnect, search, analyse, explore and understand available data to extract insights, facts and material for supporting data-led stories,” says project coordinator Anna Triantafillou.
From a technical perspective, YDS (Your Data Stories) represents a semantic data model for combining different data sources. “It offers an easy and user-friendly solution allowing the drilling down, visual exploration and combining of data into meaningful stories,” explains Triantafillou. The YDS infrastructure involves visualisation apps ranging from web applications and powerful interfaces that help users exploit data to mobile and social media applications that inform citizens and gather their feedback.
From public procurement to international trade
Importantly, the YDS platform has been piloted and validated through three different usage scenarios in three European countries. The first pilot, titled Follow Public Money, advanced fiscal transparency and participation in Greece through smart personalised re-purposing by citizens and businesses of large volumes of publicly available data related to public procurement. The pilot was based on the open data set provided by the Greek Transparency Programme Initiative (Diavgeia) and Greece’s National Strategic Reference Framework 2007-2013. “The Diavgeia project represents the most progressive transparency effort on a global scale, based on comprehensive, proactive, real-time and machine-processable open data provision,” highlights Triantafillou.
The second pilot, dubbed Tracking Development Aid and International Trade, analysed international development cooperation and its relations to international trade from a Dutch point of view. The scope of the pilot was extended to include many European countries.
In parallel, the third pilot on Cross-Europe Financial Comparability focused on the comparability of financial data across EU Member States to examine data at EU level, national level and local level. It particularly studied the city of Galway in Ireland and compared it to other EU cities.
YDS can also exploit the social web to enhance the use of Big Data. “The project’s proposed solutions can explore and capitalise on the synergy between the semantic and social web,” reveals Triantafillou. The project coordinator points out that the social web can provide insights into public interest regarding a certain topic, for example a construction project, helping to assess its impact on society. “Interesting analyses, ranging from ‘top-10’ lists to news stories, can be pushed to the social web, helping to raise interest in specific and usually human-driven data aspects,” she adds.
Better articles and media stories
One of the most interesting features of YDS is that it can bring data from different sources together to enrich a story. “Citizens or journalists know that interesting stories can emerge from exploring open governmental data sets, and they want to use the data to tell these stories,” notes Triantafillou. YDS ultimately serves as an interactive canvas enabling citizens and journalists to find the hidden stories in data.
The latest version of the YDS platform was released in January 2018 after successful validation involving the three test case scenarios. The platform will no doubt be very useful in the media sector, such as for journalists and news organisations looking to identify, investigate and create news stories.

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - YDS (Your Data Stories)

The revolution in information technology over the last years has proven its ability to process huge amounts of data and made evident that big data can change the world. Open Government Data (OGD), from being an obscure possibility just recently, is spreading across the globe at a phenomenal rate, delivering the promise to spur innovation, to deliver better services for less money, to improve planning, to increase transparency, and to reduce corruption. In this context, YourDataStories (YDS) envisions to bring this promise closer to reality, through a highly customizable online platform for data exploitation focused in the financial flows that are critical for transparency, collaboration, and participation. Users, ranging from governmental bodies to journalists and to citizens, will be facilitated by powerful and established tools, not only to discover relevant information but also to remix it with diverse and dynamic data sources: YDS acts like an interactive canvas to enable data citizens to (re)write their own data history. In addition, YDS aims to bring open data in social computing, by adding a third social dimension to the data, by making semantically linked open data visible and usable in popular social media platforms, where the data can be seen, used, linked, and augmented by millions of users in order to become part of their user stories. Both the platform and the applications provided by YDS concentrate on covering real user needs, focusing on the needs of governmental bodies such as ministries and municipalities as well as information communicators, such as journalists. The YDS will be piloted and validated in three different usage scenarios: 1) Follow Public Money: Aiming to help mainly the public, but also journalists and other stakeholders, to see what is happening with public money. The focus will be on money spent on public infrastructure (i.e. big contraction projects in Greece). 2) Tracking Development Aid in the Netherlands: Aiming to increase the transparency of public spending and evaluate the efficiency of development aid in the Netherlands. 3) Cross-Europe Financial Comparability: Focusing on the comparability of financial data across EU member-states, specifically looking at Ireland and Greece.

Final report providing aggregate and focus-group based feedback into the development process, complete with a prioritised list of necessary amendments as well as a non-binding wish-list as expressed by the users. This report will also assess the overall success of YDS against its objectives and the benchmarks elaborated in the pilot planning document. This deliverable concerns both tasks 6.3 and 6.4.

This deliverable will give an intermediate overview of the dissemination material produced and activities undertaken (exhaustive list of all the papers, presentations, publications and demonstrations published or performed) during the duration of the project.

The document will describe in detail the approach to user evaluation and validation of YDS results, including theoretical background, specific tweaks for the purposes of YDS, evaluation and monitoring techniques, and criteria to be applied.

This deliverable will describe the major dissemination objectives, will define common guidelines to be used by all partners and will provide the first set of specific dissemination actions and material. It will also include the concept and live presentation of the project website and an impact measurement matrix.

First report providing aggregate and focus-group based feedback into the development process, complete with a prioritised list of necessary amendments as well as a non-binding wish-list as expressed by the users. This deliverable concerns both tasks 6.3 and 6.4.

This document will update the initial dissemination plan. It will also incorporate eventual new conferences and other events that offer dissemination possibilities as well as newly established means of communication (including social networks) that could be used.